1. Field of Art
The present invention generally relates to the field of medical information, and more specifically, to accessing medical records.
2. Description of the Related Art
Providing quality health care and related services (e.g., pharmaceutical services, medical services) depends on having the ability to reliably access various types of records. In the case of patients, information regarding a particular patient may be needed by various different types of health care related entities. For example, any one of a hospital, a health care organization, a clinic, a clinical or hospital lab, an insurance company, or a pharmacy may need access to particular computerized patient information. Such information retrieval generally occurs by querying a database associated with the health care related entity performing the query. The database typically contains all or part of what is referred to as a “Master Patient Index” (MPI), which is a collection of patient information and identifiers. Particularly, an MPI is a collection of indexed patient records, where each record contains information about a particular patient. In practice, user and system-level applications submit known or believed patient information to the database, which then uses the MPI patient matching logic to match the incoming data with information stored in the database. If a match is found, the record (or pointer thereto) is returned to the querying entity. If the patient cannot be matched, the MPI creates a new patient record.
While a typical database is designed to work within or for a particular health care related entity, such as a particular hospital or a particular medical group, including among disparate information systems across the health care related entity, the increased mobility of individuals throughout the overall health care system and the constant evolution of health care makes retrieval of patient information by one or more different local, state, regional, or national health care related entities more common. However, accessing medical information stored in different health care related entities is complicated by the presence of political issues among entities, the lack of cooperation between competing entities and the storage of medical information in different formats by different health care related entities.
Because different health care related entities generally have different ways of configuring, storing, submitting, searching for, and handling medical information, such as patient information. For example, one health care related entity could have policies in place or be configured to enter all ‘1’s in a social security field of a query when the social security number of a patient is unknown, whereas another health care related entity could have policies in place or be configured to enter ‘123-45-6789’ for an unknown social security number. Thus, when configuring a centralized database, algorithm adjustments aimed to improve a matching accuracy for one health care related entity could come at the expense of reducing matching accuracy for another health care related entity or requiring multiple health care related entities to drastically reconfigure their data storage and/or retrieval methods. Accordingly, because of such a “win/loss” effect and the overhead of modifying existing medical information storage by health care related entities, otherwise offsets the potential benefits of using a centralized database.
Another way to “share” medical information between multiple health care related entities involves the use of an electronic data interchange (EDI). EDI allows entities to transfer data according to prescribed business standards. However, although EDI can be used to share certain medical information, EDI is not helpful for determining the identity of a patient based on incomplete or ambiguous information. In other words, EDI poorly supports, if at all, reliably matching queries with patient records.